The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Hard though Johnson’s staff had worked when he was a congressional secretary, it had to work harder now. “There was much more work than there had been when we were with Kleberg, because he [Johnson] wanted an organization built overnight, the same type of organization that it had taken him four years to build with Kleberg,” Latimer says. Birdwell, who hadn’t worked in Kleberg’s office, had thought at first that the workload would ease when the backlog of letters was eliminated, but when they had caught up, the load seemed to get heavier; the mail, Birdwell saw, was the best way to make people feel “they had a close personal relationship, a close personal rapport, with their Congressman,” so if there wasn’t enough mail, “we had to generate mail.” No matter how hard they worked, Birdwell was to say, “we never did get caught up”—and, he came to realize, they never would.

  Johnson seemed unable to meet the demands he was making on himself. His insistence on overseeing every detail, because he “never could really be sure that things would go right unless he was in control of everything—everything!” had not diminished with success. Birdwell saw now what Latimer and Jones had seen years before: “He signed every letter,” no matter how brief, or how unimportant the subject matter. “No one rubber-stamped his name on a letter. He looked at and read every letter. If we wrote something that didn’t sound right, why, it was rewritten.” Success seemed only to have increased his tension: he smoked constantly now, about three packs a day, often lighting one cigarette while another was still burning in the ashtray, taking those deep puffs, head bent toward the floor, as if to draw the last bit of relaxing smoke into his lungs. He was not as gaunt as he had been, but he stayed thin, and a new physical symptom developed: a rash on his fingers; his hands became very dry and scaly, and the skin cracked painfully. Doctors prescribed a salve, but told him the cause was nervousness. The problem kept getting worse. At night, signing the hundreds of letters that his aides had prepared for his signature, his right hand would begin to bleed through the cracks in the skin. Wrapping a small towel around his hand so that the letters wouldn’t be stained with blood, he would nonetheless sign every one. Had he been fearful, worried, almost desperate before his victory in the election? No more fearful, worried and desperate than he was after his victory.

  The gifted Herbert C. Henderson was the one assistant with a special place on the Johnson staff because Johnson considered his speechwriting talent too important to be wasted. He had his own office in which he kept files on all relevant political topics of the day, and wrote speeches for Johnson to deliver on his trips back to the district. Birdwell and Latimer handled the rest of the work.

  Birdwell couldn’t stand the pace. “Lyndon said, ‘You’ve got to speed up your typing, and you’ve got to get shorthand down,’” he recalls. “So after working ten or twelve hours in the office, I went to typing and shorthand class. I was pretty fagged out, and I never did get my shorthand down too well.” His weight had dropped from 165 pounds to 130 pounds, and, he says, “I was about ready to crack up.” And he simply couldn’t learn to take shorthand as fast as Johnson wanted it taken. Johnson sent him back to Texas to work for the NYA.

  Latimer, of whom Johnson now wrote, “I think he is the best [secretary] in the Capitol,” wasn’t so lucky. In August of 1938, Johnson asked him to work for him full time, and Latimer agreed. Once Johnson had hugged and talked to the young man with a “wonderful smile,” “the best-natured little guy you ever saw,” who was so dependent on him; now there was no time for such interludes. There was only work—work of an even greater intensity than before. “I felt I was literally working myself to death,” Latimer says. “I never drew a breath.” He says: “Almost a year to the day later—in August of 1939, I believe—nature took its toll and I had what is commonly called a breakdown.” Crying now as he speaks, he says: “I just told him, ‘You never said I did anything wrong, but you never said I did anything right. Seems like in a year you might have said. …’” He “resigned,” and left Washington to recuperate at his parents’ home in Texas.

  New men were brought in, one after the other. Two were to stay: twenty-two-year-old John B. Connally, who had been student body president at the University of Texas and who was within a few years to display a political aptitude of his own; and Walter Jenkins. The method of Jenkins’ recruitment reveals the caution and secretiveness with which Lyndon Johnson approached the hiring even of a secretary. Johnson had asked a UT dean to recommend a student for a job on his office staff, and the dean had recommended Jenkins, but Jenkins didn’t know this. He didn’t know what job he was being interviewed for. He assumed it was a post with the Texas division of the National Youth Administration because his first interview was with its deputy director, Willard Deason, and his next was with its director, Jesse Kellam. But neither Deason nor Kellam mentioned a specific job, and Jenkins was then interviewed by Austin’s Postmaster, Ray Lee. The next call came from an official of the Office of Government Reports, and for the first time a job was mentioned; “He said it was for a job in his office,” Jenkins recalls. Only after he had passed screening by these four Johnson aides was the true purpose of the interviews revealed. “I got a call from John Connally, and he said, ‘Would you like to drive out to Johnson City tonight and meet Lyndon Johnson?’ I said, ‘Who’s Lyndon Johnson?’ I was from Wichita Falls and had never heard of him.” Jenkins had dinner with Johnson at the Casparis’ Café, and after hours of answering questions, the young student was asked, “Would you like to work for me?” Jenkins was to come to understand this circuitous approach: “Because if they decided not to offer me a job, my feelings wouldn’t have been hurt”—in other words, Johnson wouldn’t have made an enemy. In Jenkins, Johnson found a true successor to Latimer: a young man similarly willing to work hard, and similarly dependent on him psychologically. A friend of Jenkins who would in 1941 visit Washington and board with him for a few nights recalls the young man returning to his room so tired that he fell asleep in the bathtub; “Johnson was working him like a nigger slave,” he says.

  Johnson seemed determined to learn every program, and get the most possible out of it for his district. By December 17 when Congress adjourned and he and Lady Bird began the drive home, he had obtained not only the $5 million in federal funds for the Marshall Ford Dam, but PWA appropriations for projects ranging from a grandstand for the Smithville High School football field to a new firehouse in Austin and a new “Federal Building” in Elgin. He was able to get more for the district than had the veteran Buchanan—to the astonishment, in particular, of Austin’s Mayor Tom Miller. In 1933, Miller had submitted an application to the PWA for a combined grant and loan ($112,500) for additions to the Austin City Hall. The grant had several times been rejected, and the disappointed Mayor had not resubmitted it in 1937. On August 26, 1937, however, Miller received a telephone call from Washington. His new Congressman—the Congressman he had thought would not be able to get things done in Washington—was on the line to tell him that PWA Administrator Ickes had just approved the project—and not as a combined grant and loan, but as a full grant the city would not have to pay back. Soon new PWA grants—for a new wing on the municipal hospital, for a new building at the municipal airport, for new streetlights—were flowing into the city at a rate that, the Mayor told friends, he would never have believed possible.

  On September 1, 1937, President Roosevelt had signed an act creating the United States Housing Authority, which could make loans for low-cost slum-clearance projects. An Austin Housing Authority—E. H. Perry, an elderly retired cotton broker, chairman, but Alvin J. Wirtz, vice chairman and key figure—had been quickly established at Johnson’s urging, and had proposed a $714,000 project to tear down the squalid shacks in Austin’s three slum areas and replace them with three modern garden-apartment projects, one for whites, one for blacks and one for Mexican-Americans. Herman Brown’s opposition had dissolved with the compromise Alice Glass had suggested, but many details remained to be solved. Arriving in Austin on December 20,
the new Congressman set about resolving them. Austin’s loan application would be the first from anywhere in the country to arrive on the desk of Federal Housing Administrator Nathan Straus; Austin would be one of the first five cities to receive FHA approval.

  When Johnson returned to Washington in 1938, the pace only accelerated. In 1933, sixteen municipal projects suggested by the city of Austin—their cost would total $2,566,400—had been turned down by the PWA; now Johnson told Mayor Miller to resubmit all sixteen. Not long thereafter, the Mayor was summoned out of a City Council meeting: Congressman Johnson was on the phone from Washington. Miller returned to tell the Council that three of the sixteen projects (a tuberculosis sanitorium, a municipal incinerator, an automatic fire-alarm system in public buildings) had been approved—and that the other thirteen would be approved shortly. One project had long been a particular dream of the Mayor’s: the reconstruction of a low dam in the Colorado River at Austin. The dam had been built in 1900, and destroyed that same year by a flood—and ever since the city had been trying, without success, to find the money to restore it. For thirty-eight years it had stood as a useless heap of masonry in the capital; now Johnson persuaded the PWA to finance its rebuilding, at a cost of $2,300,000, and at his suggestion it was renamed: the Tom Miller Dam.

  IT WAS NOT, however, in the city that Lyndon Johnson made his greatest impact in his district. It was in the countryside—in the Hill Country where he had been born.

  The New Deal’s effect on the Hill Country had been more limited than its effect on more prosperous Texas counties such as the Fourteenth District’s counties down on the Gulf Coast. The reason—as always in the Hill Country—was the land. The AAA paid farmers to take land out of cotton cultivation. But up on the Edwards Plateau, much of the land had been taken out of cultivation decades before—by the fast-spreading brush which had gobbled up so much of the ground that whole sections of the country as far as the eye could see were covered with the cedar and scrub oak and mesquite whose fierce roots had drained the ground of moisture and fertility, and whose low, wide branches had interlocked in a canopy that cut off from grass the sun it needed if it was to live. The fertility of much of the rest of the land had been so thoroughly drained by erosion and over-cropping, and by the aridity of the climate, that it didn’t pay to plant seed in it anyway. In Blanco County, for example, only about 35,000 acres—less than 10 percent of the land—had been under cultivation in 1933. This land was divided among 708 farmers, so that the average farmer was working only about fifty acres, perhaps thirty in cotton. The 40 percent reduction required by the AAA and its successor acts meant a reduction for the average farmer of only twelve acres. And AAA crop-reduction payments were based on the amount of cotton that would have been grown on acres taken out of production; Hill Country land was so unproductive that twelve acres produced perhaps two bales, and the typical Hill Country farmer therefore received a government check for about sixty dollars. Sixty dollars would help—but not enough. And in 1934, 1936 and 1937, there was drought on the Edwards Plateau—which reduced the production of cotton still further, to a point at which, the Blanco County News reported in 1937, “The cotton quotas are of very little interest in Blanco County. Only two gins ran there last year, and they didn’t do much more than pay the overhauling cost of repairing the gins.” The government was buying cattle for about twelve dollars per head. This could translate into a substantial sum in a fertile blackland county where a rancher might be running hundreds, or thousands, of head; it did not mean much to the Hill Country rancher attempting to graze a few cows among the cedar. Truman Fawcett, whose father had “five or six” head, recalls: “The people were glad to have the, the—twelve dollars, I think it was. They couldn’t sell the cattle [privately], and they were glad to get it, but that wasn’t much cash.”

  The people of the Hill Country were grateful for what the New Deal had done for them; little as had been the help they had realized from its programs, it was far more help than anyone had ever given them before. But their lives were not changed by the New Deal. The Hill Country was a country in which there was unbelievably little cash. In 1937 as in 1932, the Johnson City High School nearly missed basketball season—because the school could not afford a basketball; after several weeks of fund-raising, the News reported that “collections are coming in too slow on the basketball.” Store owners found that any item costing more than a dime was likely to go unsold. “People couldn’t pay for anything,” says Lucille O’Donnell of Burnet. “The people bought everything on credit. Whatever you bought, you would pay for it when the cotton came in. And whatever your cotton crop brought in, the storekeeper took off your bill. No money changed hands. I remember I didn’t have three cents to send a letter.” Their poverty forbade them most modern improvements. In the more prosperous counties of Texas, gasoline-driven tractors were in widespread use; in a typical Hill Country county—Kendall—there were, in 1933, three tractors. Hill Country farmers plowed their fields with mules and hand-held plows—plowed their fields as European peasants had been plowing fields for centuries. The people of the Hill Country lived at a level so low that the New Deal could not reach far enough down to reach them. A very long arm would be necessary if they were ever to be helped.

  JOHNSON DISPLAYED AGAIN the ingenuity and energy in obtaining benefits for his constituents from the federal bureaucracy that he had displayed as a congressional secretary. Though some of these benefits were relatively small, and available only once, they provided a sorely needed lift to those who received them. In one area, floods had destroyed the crops of hundreds of farmers for the second successive year. In December, 1938, Johnson arrived at a meeting with the farmers accompanied by a second car full of men. When the farmers told him that the Farm Security Administration had responded to their pleas for emergency loans by refusing to make an exception to the requirement that loans be secured by collateral—a requirement impossible for most of them to meet because their land and possessions were already mortgaged—their Congressman pointed to the back of the room, where the men who had accompanied him were standing. They were officials of the Farm Security Administration, he said. He had brought them along so they could hear the plight of the Tenth District for themselves. Two days later, on Christmas Eve, the farmers’ leaders received telephone calls from their Congressman. The FSA had just agreed to waive the collateral requirements for 400 Tenth District families because of “unusual conditions,” he told them. Each family would receive fifty dollars—enough to tide them over until federal seed loans became available in the Spring. At that very moment, he said, four FSA supervisors, accompanied by stenographers, were on their way to the area to speed the processing of the loans.

  And some of the benefits Johnson obtained were not small—and were quite long-lasting.

  One Agriculture Department program—“Range Conservation”—had the potential to be particularly helpful in this land of brush. Instituted in 1935, it was designed to encourage the removal of various varieties of brush by paying farmers to cut it down. But the program was not helping the Hill Country. In part, this was because the farmers and ranchers of the Hill Country simply did not know that their land could be made better; it had been arid and infertile, after all, for three generations. But there were other reasons as well. Some varieties of brush prevalent in the Hill Country were not covered by the program, and in addition the payment-per-acre schedule was low. This did not matter in more prosperous areas, where the work was done by hired hands receiving low wages, whose employers were amply reimbursed by the increased fertility of the cleared land. But the typical Hill Country farmer had no hired hands; his only resource was his own time, every minute of which seemed necessary for his very survival, and payments were too low to justify him using any for some possible future gain. Besides, to most Hill Country farmers, the possibility of future gain seemed very faint. Many didn’t even know about the program. The isolation of the Edwards Plateau—the distances (and inadequate roads) that separated it
s farms and ranches from Austin and San Antonio, their lack of radio and daily newspapers; the inadequacy of the amateurish weeklies—prevented its inhabitants from learning about developments with which farmers in other areas were familiar. The county agents of the land-grant colleges’ Agricultural Extension Service were supposed to explain new programs, but the Hill Country’s poverty made even explanations difficult; the federal government matched a county’s allocation for a county agent and his assistants; because most Hill Country counties couldn’t afford any contribution for assistants, its county agents had to spend much of their time on paper work—and much of the rest of it making veterinary calls in counties too poor to support a veterinarian. To the farmers, moreover, the county agents were merely “book farmers” whose theories would not work in the Hill Country’s harsh conditions. The experience of the few Hill Country ranchers who had signed up for the Range Conservation program did not encourage others to follow suit; the red tape involved was discouraging as was the slowness of the payments: in March, 1937, some payments still had not been received for acreage that had been cleared in the Summer of 1936.